Means 'pichadores: maintainance (buffing) costs of this facade keep us from giving money to the church/charity' sorta

for the record, pichação has been a part of São Paulo since around 1982 - and that had nothing to do with Beat Street or any other contact with NYC graff. It was buidling off a political graffiti tradition that began in the 1960s.

And Philly has been going since, what - 1965 or so? The new book Public Wall Writing in Philadelphia (freenewsproject.com) has a lot of that info, btw....

The tsssss book is nice, I have it - there is cool super rookie card blackbook stuff of the gemeos, herbert, vitche, etc. Wish it were even longer and had more info!

before the next neighbourhood king once again calls bullshit on this style, let me emphasize this from the EYE article

The pichadores have developed a ductus or sequence of strokes which is concerned with structure rather than outline. The method is the same whether they use a roller or a spray can.The form is conceived instinctively based on structural and proportional criteria above all else, like a segmented line that has been integrated into a frame. It exploits the potential of a given space to the maximum.

If I understand this correctly, Pixação is nearer typography than tags are.If you look at some of those writings you can see that the pixação writers fill a whole width of a wall with text, they don't start writing half-assedly from the middle of the wall and finish where the word ends. I cant read or follow half of this shit myself or really see the finest aesthetics of the style, but I acknowledge this and don't approach it like some sandy vag grandma approaches ink tags and silver fill-ins that don't look nice in the context of textile craft and knitting. Most you guys do exactly that while not even attempting to read what it says or make out half of the letters.

^ whole width from left to right.

To some extent these pixação guys seem to follow certain basic typography, like straight baseline, kerning and tracking. They seem to play around with the way a person usually reads words as pictures, not individual letters: they construct entire sentences that consist of highly decorational and "far-fetched" letters. Some also seem to pay a fair amount of attentiont to the negative space created between and in middle of strokes of the letters, to make the words visually balanced.

For random trivia I remember reading from the article that 80's heavy metal band logos influenced the styles and people die from falling off the roofs and windows while doing this shit. You just cant imagine the environment that makes someone want to write something with all those risks. it sure aint hip hop or random pussy

- Ttsss book seems to be divided in 2 different sections: a first one with articles signed by different authors, a selection of drawings and amazing photos and a second section with 12 different alphabets in the typical Brazilian pixos style. How did you work on this project and how much time did you spend on it?

This book started when the Editora do Bispo saw my agenda. I have had this agenda (and maintained it) for more than ten years. Is where I collect the signatures of various pixadores. The original idea was to make this book solely about the agenda. But one thing leads to another and the project has grown. Joao Wainer already had photos from pixos through out the city and we got together to take some pictures “ in action”. Then the book became more interesting with the agenda and the photos, and the alphabet was a consequence. Nevertheless this alphabet is not definitive since every day there is someone else doing pixo with new forms of writing.

- The study of letters is probably the main focus of this book. In the graffiti world those letters became pretty famous with the OsGemeos and soon several people in the Europe, too, began to follow this style. Could you give us a short history about that maybe explaining the difference between graffiti stuff and street gang stuff?

Pixo is something you do very fast and the stile is always vertical. On the other hand grafiti spreads out the letters and drawings.Pixo is hell and most people hate it and is considered pure garbage to make some durtiness. But grafiti is not considered that way because has colors and forms, even though both being illegal.

- Ttsss, the name of the book, represents the sound of the spray paint. But most of the pixos words that I could see until today were done with latex paint. Is there any evolution in the type of tools used for that?

It is not really an evolution. Spray is expensive and latex you can find in the garbage.

- How much the city background (in this case Sao Paulo) is important for the develop of a typical style in lettering? And what about in lifestyle in general?

The city background is every thing. The letters are vertical and full of edges by influence of the buildings and the city skyline.

If you want a window in to try reading some of this stuff, look at the photos that Santos L Halper just posted - TUMULOS - meaning 'tombs' - is up in each one.

And in the white tags on black paper image above where there was the comment that there was tag influence... well, maybe. When you go to Rio de Janeiro the tags look loopy and tiny - as different from Sao Paulo's as Philly's are from NYC. Rio's are always in spray paint, and to me are genetically closer to the Philly hands than the Sao Paulo tags are.

these hands are vicious. somebody just put me on to it, and its fresh. the spacing, the height, the pride and tradition in purely the letter forms, not tosses, burners, just letters, it is related to philly style, long lost cousins.... im not saying that one has anything on the other, but it would be dope to have a philly writer and a sao paulo writer go on a mission, write eachothers names and go tag for tag. philly style is older check www.nightcrawla.com like early 70s.... but ive known about it my whole life, and never knew anything about this, so this shit is exciting to me